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Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Got rid of the mouse pad

You all know that I'm an avid Crysis 3 player and I believe I'm reasonably good at it. (Click here to watch my Crysis 3 gameplay playlist on YouTube, and please subscribe to my channel if you find it interesting.)

However, I had been having difficulty aiming at the enemy for almost the entire time I had been playing Crysis 3. At first, I blamed the high ping for that. After that, I found out that I was getting a large input lag and I changed the blame to that. But, couple of days ago I figured it could be something else as I've tweaked the system to lower the latencies to the level that I'm comfortable tweaking (without going insane like this fellow at OCN) and my aiming hasn't improved a bit.

I use either the Logitech G500 wired mouse or the G602 wireless mouse in performance mode when gaming. One might say that the G602 could be the cause of the high input lag, but honestly, I don't see any lag with the G602 compared to the G500 in the performance mode. In the endurance mode, there definitely is a noticeable input lag. That said, I'm sure there are people who can notice an input lag difference between G500 and G602 mice, because at the end of the day, the G602 is wireless and there are inherent processing delays, even if you assume zero retransmits.

Still, it shouldn't affect AIMING, right? Yesterday I watched few mouse tweaking tutorials on YouTube and I was amazed by seeing how accurate some of these CS players were. They could move the mouse to the exact position they wanted in one go, and shoot with steady hands. When I tried that, even on the desktop, I failed at every attempt. I always stopped too early and had to slowly move the point to where I wanted. Could it be that the mice I'm using have acceleration and I'm compensating for it? Mouse acceleration is very bad for gaming because it makes it difficult to move the most pointer to the exact position you want in one attempt. But, optical mice like the G602 should not have mouse acceleration, as I have heard. I could be wrong there as I am not a E-SPORTS competitor.

I could buy a better mouse, like the Mionix Naos 7000 which has a superior optical sensor. But it would not necessarily fit my hands. I’m quite used to the shape and size of the G602.

Anyways, before replacing any of the mice, I wanted to try out something cheaper. I took the Razer Sphex mouse pad off the desk and tried the old QCK Mini cloth mouse pad I had bought many years ago. Sadly, it was too slow, and there was too much traction. I threw it away, and tried the bare wooden surface of the computer desk. And wow, did it make a difference!

I guess all the problems that I had been having could be attributed to laser tracking on the mouse pad. I'm not saying that the mouse pad itself was bad - just that either those two mice didn't like that or I didn't have the settings (specifically the DPI) tuned to match the surface. And also by all means I'm not saying the wooden surface of my desk is better than any of these mouse pads either. I'm just saying that the combination is giving my the best mouse control.

I will keep using the mouse like this, until the day I feel that I need to get a new mouse pad. Right now, I think I am all good with the wooden surface.